The Cortado java applet is a pure java
implementation of a Theora decoder. Originally developed by the
folks at Fluendo S.A., and
subsequently developed by Wikimedia,
upstream stewardship was recently passed to Xiph.org.

Cortado has been used for many years as a way to support free
media content on the web, and is still an important component
as a fallback for browsers which don't yet support Ogg audio and
video streams natively.

The new maintenance team have now made their second update release of
Cortado. Since the last official Fluendo release, version 0.5.1 adds

Support for baseline Theora features used by the libtheora 1.1 encoder.

Better and faster display code.

Basic support for Ogg Kate subtitles.

Various other bug and robustness fixes.

Please visit the Cortado homepage for more
information, including downloads and examples of how to use the
applet.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. It was a real
community effort.

We've made a follow-up point release to new stable release.
This fixes some issues with the inline assembly used by the
MSVC compiler and various minor build issues. There are no other
significant changes.

After over a month of public testing, we're pleased to declare our
1.1 rewrite of libtheora stable. This is the reference implementation
for the Theora video codec. Source code for libtheora 1.1.0 is
available now, and will be incorporated in major Theora-supporting
applications soon.

What's so great about the 1.1 release? The highlights are:

Better-looking videosor

Smaller files at the same quality.

Much faster decoder.

Two-pass mode for making files just the size you
want them.

Rigid bitrate controls trade off quality for the
needs of live streaming applications.

This release incorporates all the work we've been doing over the last
year, and the encoder has been completely rewritten, although some of
the code had its genesis way back in 2003. It also brings substantial
performance and robustness improvments to the 1.0 decoder.

This release is API and ABI compatible with the 1.0 stable release
and can be used as a drop in replacement, although some changes are
needed to take advantage of new encoder features like two-pass. We
recommend upgrading to all our users.

Rate-control has been substantially overhauled from the 1.0 release.
The new rate control module hits its target much more accurately and
obeys strict buffer constraints, including dropping frames if
necessary. The latter is needed to enable live streaming without
disconnecting users or pausing to buffer during sudden motion. Obeying
these constraints can yield substantially worse quality than the 1.0
encoder, whose rate control did not obey any such constraints, and
often landed only in the vague neighborhood of the desired rate
target. The new --soft-target option can relax a few of these
constraints, but the new two-pass rate control mode gives quality
approaching full "constant quality" mode with a predictable output
size. This should be the preferred encoding method when not doing live
streaming. Two-pass may also be used with finite buffer constraints,
for non-live streaming.

Here is a list of some of the technical improvements in the 1.1
encoder.
If you have been following
Monty'sdemo
pages, many of these will be familiar to you.

Rate-distortion optimization, which leads to

Better mode decision

Better quantization decisions

Most coding decisions only use an approximation of the full RDO
process for speed reasons, but casting this in a proper RDO framework
eliminates vast swaths of heuristics and fragile thresholds from the 1.0
encoder.

Better motion search

The new motion search generates better results in less time, and
does not suffer from CPU spikes under heavy motion like the 1.0
encoder's did.

Better fDCT

The 1.0 encoder's forward transform was not well-matched to the
inverse DCT used in the decoder, and was as a result responsible for
substantial loss of detail and texture at high rates. It has been
replaced with a forward DCT that gives much smaller round-trip error.
The inverse DCT in the decoder remains unchanged, for
compatibility.

Adaptive quantization

The bitstream specification has supported changing the quantizer
on a block-by-block basis since it was first published in 2004, however
only an unreleased proof-of-concept encoder made use of this facility.
The 1.1 encoder now uses it to allocate bits more effectively within a
frame, giving improved quality at higher rates.

Better quantization matrices

The new matrices give much less ringing and mosquito noise at low
rates, substantially improving the appearance of high-contrast edges
(e.g., text).

A real rate-control module

As mentioned above, the new rate control actually meets its
targets, can enforce hard buffer constraints, and has a two-pass mode to
allow it to plan allocation decisions in advance.

Expanded rate-control API

It is now possible to change the target quality, bitrate, buffer
delay, and keyframe interval in the while encoding. This gives an
application using libtheora much more control over the final
output.

Explicit variable frame rate support in the encoder

A new API allows an application to cheaply insert duplicate frames
to maintain A-V sync during live streaming or for hybrid 24/30 fps
content. The decoder still operates at a fixed frame rate, but can
report these duplicates to the application, allowing it to skip
expensive processing.

Support for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 video

As with adaptive quantization, the specification has always
supported the less common 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma subsamplings, useful
for high contrast material like screencasts and special effects
precursors. The 1.0 decoder supported these subsamplings properly.
However, the 1.0 encoder couldn't produce streams in these formats.
They are now supported in the 1.1 encoder.

There are many other improvements in this release. The codebase is
substantially smaller, the examples have all been ported to the 1.x API,
the MSVC assembly is now in sync with the gcc assembly, and much more.
We strongly encourage all our users to upgrade.

This is not the end of the story, however. We are continuing to work
on encoder improvements, and have made significant progress on
optimizing the decoder on ARM and TI C64x DSP processors, important
for Theora playback on mobile devices.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, and especially to
the Mozilla Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat, Inc. and
private donors who supported this work.

Third beta release

2009 August 22

Another week, another release.

Like the last one, the new beta release of the encoder rewrite
fixes some problems with the new bitrate management. If you had
trouble with uneven quality with previous 1.1 releases, please
give this one a try; the behaviour is better.

First beta release of the new encoder

2009 August 5

Xiph.Org is pleased to announce the first beta release of our
reference implementation of the free Theora video format, codename
"Thusnelda".

This release incorporates extensive changes to the encoder's rate
control. The encoder is both more configurable and functions better in
all configurations. The new options include support for two-pass
encoding, the ability to change the bitrate and quality targets
dynamically during an encode, and the ability to drop frames to meet
very low bitrate targets, all commonly-requested features.

This release includes all the major features we intend for 1.1
release. Please give it a try. We're particularly interested in
sequences it does poorly on, and feedback from framework and
applications developers on the new two-pass api. For details
of how to use the two-pass
mode, please check the code in
the examples
directory.

Many thanks to Red Hat and the Mozilla Foundation, who supported this
work.

Firefox 3.5 released with native Theora support

2009 June 30

Firefox 3.5 has been
released
including native Ogg Theora+Vorbis support as part of its implementation
of the HTML5 media elment set. This is a great day for open media
standards on the web, bringing Theora support to millions of new
users.

Second alpha release of the new encoder

2009 May 26

Xiph.Org is pleased to announce the second alpha release of our next generation encoder for the free Theora video format, codename "Thusnelda". The second release incorporates a number of changes which improve both compression efficiency and execution speed.

If you're comfortable building software, please download the source
and give us some feedback.

New encoder alpha release

2009 March 27

We're pleased to announce the first alpha release of the new theora
reference encoder, code name "thusnelda".

This new version offers vastly improved quality/bitrate, making
the reference encoder much more competitive with the current generation
of encoders for other video formats. Currently in alpha, this code will
be released at libtheora-1.1 when stable.

If you're comfortable building software, please download the source
and give us some feedback.

Final 1.0 release imminent; 1.0 release candidate 2 now available

2008 October 28

The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce the second release
candidate of libtheora 1.0. This second release candidate corrects
all bugs found in final testing of the first release candidate, and
will become 1.0 final in one week if no new 'blockers' are found.

Mozilla commits support for Theora in Firefox

2008 August 2

The Xiph.Org Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation share the common goal of keeping the Web free and open for everyone, so it did not come as a surprise when Mozilla's Chris Blizzard announced that the upcoming Firefox 3.1 will support both Ogg Theora and Vorbis, alongside the HTML 5's <video> element.

This announcement paves the way for web developers to break away from proprietary media technologies. For the average user it means posting, hosting and playing video/audio data will become as easy an activity as it currently is for images. For private companies adopting these open standards it means getting rid off the middle man and his licensing fees.

With the <video> element and Theora, exciting development possibilities such as SVG desktops or annotated media will also be possible, creating new ways of interacting with video online. The adoption rate of this online revolution by other browsers soon joining the effort will help start a new age for multimedia. Be part of it.

Theora 1.0 beta3 released

2008 April 16

This is the third beta release toward our first stable implementation
of the reference library.

This release includes new separate encoder and decoder
libraries supporting the new-style API based on theora-exp. Also
included are assembly optimizations for gcc and MSVC builds, better
documentation, general robustness and bug fixes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. Please give it a
try and report any remaining issues.

Theora 1.0 beta2 released

2007 October 12

This is the second beta release toward, following three weeks after
beta 1. This release fixes some bugs and improves the specification
document. We recommend upgrading to all users.

Theora 1.0 beta1 released

2007 September 22

Moving out of alpha status Theora is now available as version 1.0 beta1. This release features
many changes since alpha7 - for example the beta1 decoder is a complete rewrite supporting the
whole Theora specification.

Debconf 7 webcasts

They have an impressive
setup this year, testing several new pieces of software, including
dvswitch for
software mixing, Pentbarf
integration for pulling metadata from the rest conference site, and
CMMLbot for integration of the live irc commentary.

And of course, there are a great number of interesting
talks
about the Debian free software distribution, and open source in general. Check
it out.

HTML5 video now!

2007 June 7

The folks at Metavid are continuing
to prove their worth. Michael Dale has updated his mv_embed script to
dynamically rewrite its host web page to use whatever support
or Ogg video is available from the browser.

That means you can just use, now, the
HTML5 <video> tag
to embed Theora in your webpage, and simply by including the javascript,
have it work on browsers which do not yet support it.

Theora Cookbook

Linux Audio Conference

2007 March 20

The Linux Audio Conference takes place this week 22-25 March, 2007.
As in past
years LAC2007 will be streamed live in Vorbis and Theora via
Icecast. If you would like to watch or listen to the streams please check
out the conference wiki
streaming
page.

Native Theora support in Opera?

2007 March 6

One of the Opera developers apparentlydemonstratednative Theora+Vorbis playback in their browser. Very cool! If we can get free
video formats implemented as the baseline for web video, we'll have
taken a major step away from the current morass of competing,
incompatible, proprietary media on the web.

Metavid theora wrapper

ITheora php wrapper for cortado

2007 January 29

Project contributor ZikZak has posted
ITheora,
a GPL php wrapper to skin the
cortado
java player. In addition to
making it pretty, it adds a few nice buttons like play/stop, download,
and so on. Instructions are in French, but the code package contains
everything you need to set it up.

Democracy shipping XiphQT

2006 October 8

The MacOS version of the excellent Democracy
Internet TV platform now ships with and installs to XiphQT components. This means that if you've installed Democracy, you can play Vorbis and Theora in other Quicktime-based applications!

International Free Software Forum video

2006 September 27

People from International
Free Software Forum (the largest brazilian
event about FLOSS) have done it two times in a row. They've
put online
the whole video coverage for this year's event (also online are the
videos from last year).

It's almost 300 hours in Theora. It's a shame there's no subtitles,
for most of the lectures are not in English...the English ones are really
good, though.

Cinelerra supports distributed theora encoding

Cinelerra is a well known
nonlinear video editor with support for renderfarms, enabiling use of
distributed cpu power to do faster rendering.

A year after getting import and export support for theora,
Cinelerra now has distributed theora encoding support, which makes
theora content creation much faster.

Thanks to Andraz Tori for this.

libtheora 1.0alpha6 release

2006 May 30

We're pleased to announce a new release of the libtheora reference
implemenation. This is an incremental update over alpha 5, consisting
primarily of bug fixes and a merge of the encoder optimizations from the
theora-mmx branch.

The offset_y member now means what every application thought it meant
(offset from the top). This will mean some old files (those with a
non-centered image created with a buggy encoder) will display
differently.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Live installfest streams

2006 March 25

The 2006 FLISOL (Festival de Instalacion de Software Libre en
Latin America) is webcasting live streams from
today's event. See here
and here
for more information.

Malagasy TV in Theora

YSTV webcast in Theora

2006 January 13

York Student Television is now
available online in Theora, both as a live stream and downloads of
past shows. Take a look or
read
about how they're using open source technology to distribute their
content in open formats.

Way to go, YSTV, this is great to see!

Note that the programs are also generally under a CC license
with a wierd additional advance notification requirement. We're not sure
how exactly that's intended to work...

libtheora 1.0 alpha 5 release

2005 August 20

We're pleased to announce a new release of the libtheora reference
implemenation. This is an incremental update over alpha 4, to draw
a line under recent work before we start adding optimization work.

There are two important bugfixes as well, so we recommend upgrading
to everyone. This release is source and binary compatible with
1.0 alpha 4.

Cinelerra adds export support for Theora

Elphel Theora camera in Xcell magazine

2005 April 23

Andrey Filippov has an
article
on his FPGA Theora encoder in Xcell Journal
this month. While the earlier article at LinuxDevices
focussed on the software, this one covers in more detail the hardware
and use of the FPGA to achieve the elphel camera's remarkable encoding
speed.

Andrey and other hackers will be demonstrating the cameras at the Open Source Forum in Moscow
next weekend.

Theora decoder ported to C#

2005 April 17

Ogre developer pjcast has a C#
port of the Theora decoder,
based primarily on the JOrbis
and Cortado java
decoders.

He reports both video and sound are working, and performance is
pretty good. The decoder components should be usable under any of
the C# frameworks, but the example playback application is still
a bit rough and not portable outside MS Windows.

Elphel FPGA camera encodes Theora

2005 March 23

Andrey Filippov has an
article today on LinuxDevices describing his open
source hardware theora encoder, embedded in the reconfigurable network
camera he designed, which is also open source. Now this is what
computing should be like!

JRoar streaming server

2005 March 22

The JRoar streaming server
now supports Theora. Has for a while actually, but then have a
nice set of test streams
up.

JRoar is a pure Java Ogg streaming server from the folks at JCraft. I can serve static files,
mirror external streams, or serve a source stream from a number of
clients. It can also serve the
JOrbis Vorbis player
directly, for a pure-url playback experience.

Thanks to the JRoar team for putting up such a nice demo of theora.

Katiuska 0.7 for KDE released

2005 January 21

Katiuska can now rip dvds by simply selecting subtitle and
audio language + audio and video quality. Katiuska
also allows you to transcode any video file to Theora.

Thoggen 0.2 released

2005 January 13

Thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on Gtk+ and
GStreamer. It creates Theora video files and features an extremely easy
and intuitively to use interface. Thoggen supports picture cropping and
resizing.

GeeXBox live CD supports theora playback

Cortado 0.1.0 released

2004 December 24

Fluendo announces the first public release of Cortado, a java-based media player applet.
Since it's a first release, building it might still be rough around the edges,
but should be possible using at least Jikes with GCJ classpath libraries, or the Sun compiler.
You can also download built .jar files of this release.

Visit Fluendo zoo to have a look at cortado in action.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at Fluendo !

libtheora 1.0 alpha 4 release

2004 December 15

We're pleased to announce a new release of the libtheora reference
implemenation. This is an incremental update over alpha 3, in support
of Icecast's use of some new utility
calls to provide theora streaming support.

apply the loop filter before filling motion vector border
in the reference frame

new utility functions:
theora_packet_isheader(),theora_packet_iskeyframe(), and
theora_granule_frame()

optional support for building without floating point

optional support for building without encode support

various build and packaging fixes

pkg-config support

SymbianOS build support

We still plan to make incompatible api changes before the first beta
release, but this new alpha provides a stable base including all the
work that has happened up to those changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Theora support in LiVES

2004 December 11

Theora is now fully supported in LiVES is a Video Editing System (LiVES), as of version 0.9.1.
If you are interested in having a nice, user friendly interface for
testing out theora, then download LiVES and try it. (http://lives.sourceforge.net)

Fluendo funds RTP streaming of Theora and Vorbis

2004 December 6

Streaming media startup Fluendo.com
announced today they will be funding a spec and reference implementation
for encapsulation of Theora video and Vorbis audio over the RTP streaming
protocol, important for multicast, digital broadcast, and conferencing
applications.

While HTTP streaming of Ogg-encapsulated multimedia has been supported
for most of the history of our free codecs, RTP support is an oft-requested
feature that we've never had a good solution for. We're very happy to
see Fluendo driving this new work.

Phil Kerr will be managing the developement of the new drafts. The
development process is open, with discussion taking place in the new
xiph-rtp
mailing list. Please join if you're interested in these issues.

Theora encoder, Katiuska 0.6.1, released

2004 November 21

Katiuska is a theora encoder frontend that runs on KDE. It uses ffmpeg2theora, mencoder,
the encoder_example that comes with the theora libs and a little gpl bash script. It can
encode mostly any kind of video that ffmpeg and mencoder can (avi, mpeg4 and 2, quicktime etc).

On a KDE system, first install libtheora (see navigation links to the left).

Windows installer for RealPlayer plugins

2004 November 20

A Windows installer for version 0.5 of the Helix Theora &
Vorbis plugins for RealPlayer 10/10.5 and RealOne Player has been released. There are no code
changes from the 0.5 zip file that was posted earlier. This just replaces the
zip file with an installer. You can get the installer at:

Fluendo test stream

2004 September 30

Fluendo has posted a stable test stream for those wanting to try
theora's network aspect. It's mostly just a webcam of their office,
and often rather dull at night (or when the power is out) but it's nice
to have something that's generally available for testing. Thanks,
Fluendo!

v2v posts theora content

2004 September 28

Florian Schneider has posted video from the neuro conference this past February in
Munich, all in theora format. This includes a panel
discussion with Enno Patalas, revered film preservationist; Brian
Holmes; Sebastian Lütgert; and Ralph Giles, one of the theora
developers. General documentation of the conference and its other
sessions is available here.

Florian has also posted versions of a programme he produced for the
German French tv station arte. Torrents for unorg
and world
are available.

Interview with Fluendo CEO, Julien Moutte

2004 September 11

OSNews has an in inteview with Julien Moutte discussing upcoming
products and services based
on Theora, including a java version of the Theora client that
will allow viewing of Theora format video inside web browsing windows. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8218

kfile_theora 0.2 announced

2004 August 28

kfile_theora is a KDE kfile plugin that will display infos about Theora video files in konqueror & meta data dialog.
Currently gives info about size, length, quality and some audio settings.
Requires libogg, libvorbis and libtheora.

Richard Stallman on software patents

2004 August 25

Videos in Theora format of Richard Stallman of
FSF + Christian Engström and Marco Schulze of FFII visiting the
Estonian Information Technology College, and
talking about the danger of patenting software have been put on the net.

Guadec broadcast in theora

2004 June 29

Streaming startup fluendo.com has
been demonstrating their encoding and server application at GUADEC this year, broadcasting the
presentations live in theora. This is a great
demonstration of open media technology. Congratulations to fluendo and a
big thanks to everyone who made this possible!

During the conference, the live streams are available from
http://stream1.hia.no/ along with
viewer suggestions. Archives are available at the same url if you
missed something.

What a change a year makes. Last year, we were very sad to see GU4DEC 2003 broadcasting the talks in
the proprietary RealVideo format. Now, not only are the talks in a free
video format, but you can use
RealPlayer to watch them!

Creative Commons videos

2004 June 15

In honor of our slashdotting, we've made torrents available for
small and
large versions of
the top three winning promotion videos for the Creative
Commons licenses, encoded in theora. Free content in a free format.

Theora I bitstream freeze

Big news. The Theora I bitstream format is now frozen! This means it's safe
to start distributing videos in the theora format.

Files produced by the alpha 3 reference encoder will be supported by
all future decoders.

Beta 1 was going to be the official freeze point, but was delayed by
continuing work on the draft specification document; however
we have reviewed enough of the design in writing the spec that we no
longer need to reserve the right to make corrections to
the encoder behavior.

So go ahead, there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!

Theora alpha 3 release

2004 March 20

We're pleased to announce the alpha 3 release of the theora reference
implementation.

The encoded image has been flipped to match the sense used in VP3,
with the origin at the lower left. This allows lossless transcoding
of VP3 content.

The decoder data tables included in the bitstream header are more
complete and have more scope for future encoder improvements.

Some experimental tools are available in the win32 directory,
including a transcoder for avi vp3 files.

We hope there were be no more incompatible bitstream changes, but as
with previous alpha releases we make no promises that the format will
not change again.

Experimental playback support is now available (separately) for
Helix/Realplayer 10, Xine and mplayer; you might look at those if you
want a more full-featured player. Be sure to use an alpha-3 compatible
version.

Source now in subversion

2004 March 20

We've switched our version control system to
subversion
from cvs, along with all the other Xiph.Org Foundation projects.

Please make a fresh checkout if you're following the
development tree:

svn checkout http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora

as cvs is no longer updated. You can also mount the
dav url directly on your desktop for read-only access.

Status update

2004 January 26

There hasn't been much progress of late. Derf has been working on a new encoder, and in doing so
came up with some suggested bitstreams changes to increase the scope for future encoder
improvements. These will be integrated into the reference encoder and released as 'alpha 3' for
testing.

The main hold-up for the beta release is still a draft spec. Everyone's waiting for this because
it means the format will be frozen and encoded files will be supported by future versions of the
reference implementation. So if you want to help things along pull out the code and help with the
documentation, or donate something to help pay for the work.

Theora alpha 2 release

2003 June 9

The libtheora reference implementation has reached its 'alpha 2' milestone.
A lot of bugs have been fixed and new features added, including all the
planned changes to the bitsteams format.

This is more of an internal milestone than a public release, but we are
making a source tarball
available for convenience. Nevertheless we recommend using the
svn version if possible. This release also requires svn
libogg and libvorbis to compile; you might try the
svn nightly tarball
if you don't already have these checked out. You will need to build and
install the 'ogg' and 'vorbis' modules.

VP3 Legacy Codec binaries

2003 May 8

Mauricio Piacentini has been maintaining the original VP32 sources upon which theora is
based. He's pooling his efforts with Xiph a bit and has decided to keep his work in xiph.org
svn, in the 'vp32' module where the code was originally released. We hope this will help
concentrate efforts related to theora and bring additional focus to both
projects.

He is also making his binary builds for Quicktime 6 and Video for Windows available on
this site. Please visit the legacy VP3 page
for file links and complete information.

Status update

2007 May 7

Things have been slow for some time, so we just wanted to say what's been happening.
Monty's been busy with unrelated contract work since finishing the zero-copy libogg,
and no one has stepped up to act as maintainer in the meantime. We've been working
on a wiki todo for theora and for
xiph generally. So feel free to look (and contribute)
there.

Test Suite

Robot Roll Call

2002 December 16

The first part of Theora Alpha Two, the delicious Video Layer FAQ is now
available on the FAQ
page, written by Dan Miller. The second part is libogg hacking, the
results of which will be posted just a little after December 27th. Alpha
Two is really more of an informational release than a big downloadable
install-fest, so don't fire up the testbeds just yet.

Welcome to theora.org, the official website for Theora, a video
codec and integration project maintained and supported by the Xiph.Org Foundation for the benefit of
all humankind.

What is Theora? Theora will be a video codec that builds upon On2's VP3
codec. While Vorbis has reached 1.0,
Theora is currently being integrated into the Ogg multimedia framework,
as well as being optimized from the VP3 codebase at its heart.

Theora will be released in June of 2003, with three major milestones, the
first being released today, September 25th, 2002. Today's piece is
available for download in the 'theora' module of the Xiph.Org FoundationSVN repository, as well as a UNIX tarball available
here.

There's a lot of useful information under the hood, so please have a
look around by using the navigation links at the top of the page. If
there's anything you think that we need on this page, please
contact us and let us
know what you'd like to see.

For the legal terms on the usage of the VP3 codec, please check out the
SVN page. If you would like
to help sponsor the development of Theora and other open technologies from
the Xiph.Org Foundation, please consider a donation! More information is
available at this link.